Kinect hack builds 3D maps of the real world

Noted Kinect-tinkerer Martin Szarski has used a car, a
laptop, an Android smartphone and the aforementioned Xbox 360
peripheral to make a DIY-equivalent of Google Street View.

The Kinect's multi-camera layout can be used to capture some
fuzzy, but astonishingly effortless 3D maps of real world locations
and objects. As we saw in Oliver Kreylos' early hack, you can take the data from Kinect's
depth-sensitive camera to map out a 3D point-cloud, with real
distances. Then use the colour camera's image to see which RGB
pixel corresponds to each depth point, and eventually arrive at a
coloured, textured model.

That's all well and good for a static image of your bedroom,
but once the Kinect starts moving between each data-dump, it needs to know
exactly where it is to accurately stitch the photos together. To do
this, Szarski used his Google Nexus One's GPS chip to log the NMEA string (an
internationally recognised format for pinpoint, real-time
positioning) of each photo.

Then all he needs to do is drive down his street, as the
Kinect, laptop and Android team log a series of colour images, 3D
point clouds and global positions into a collection of data points.
Throw those into a custom-made program, and voila; you have a 3D
model of your street, and its geo-tagged for easy placement on an
map like Google Earth.

"The point cloud is a bit messy because I did not have easy
access to gyroscopes or accelerometers to track the motion of the
car," admits Szarski. "Perhaps this is a good excuse to purchase a
Nexus S."